Monday, November 14, 2011

I’ve just been starting to read and think more about
essences, in particular the debate which has followed Kit Fine’s argument in
“Essence and Modality” (1993) that essences cannot be understood in modal
terms. The modal understanding is that
an essential property of an object is one is must have of necessity (in order
to be that object), while properties it can (possibly) do without are
accidental. Fine, on his way to
advocating a definitional notion of essence, said the modal understanding was
too broad: an object may have certain
necessary attributes which are intuitively not essential. In the paper, he offered some examples intended to bolster this point.

Now I’ve read a few papers which take issue with Fine’s
argument. In particular, one line of protest, due to Michael Della Rocca, notes
that Fine’s examples are of necessities which seem trivially true of all
objects or existents, and the modal understanding of essence can be recast by a
focus on non-trivial necessary properties.

For present purposes, though, I want to concede that there
is an intuitive sense that essence seems prior to its modal understanding (even
if the latter turns out to be extensionally equivalent): when I try to think of what properties are
necessary to an object I seem to be appealing to some non-modal definition I
have in mind.

But do we really want to add essences as irreducible
elements in our ontology? While I’m attracted to some Aristotelian or
neo-Aristotelian notions (such as causal powers), my inner Occam wants to
resist essences.

One clue to a way to think about this dilemma occurred to me
while reading Michael Gorman’s paper, “The Essential and the Accidental”. Gorman highlights one of the passages about
the nature of essential properties discussed by Fine in another paper (“Senses
of Essence”, which I have not read):
“An essential property of an object is a constitutive part of the
essence of that object if it is not had in virtue of being a consequence of
some more basic essential properties of the object; and otherwise it is a
consequential part of the essence.”
Perhaps this constitutive subset should be the real target of our idea
of essence.

While Fine’s idea of distinguishing consequential properties
from constitutive properties is one of logical consequence, Gorman takes this
as an inspiration to develop an account of essence that depends on the notion
of explanation. Perhaps the essential properties of an object are those which
cannot be explained by appeal to other characteristics (while accidental
properties are those that can be so explained).
The paper elucidates this argument and considers possible
objections. This view is distinct from
the modal understanding because it can accomodate necessary but non-essential
properties.

For myself, being in a very preliminary stage of studying
these issues, I reserve my opinion about Gorman’s particular strategy, but am
led to a desire to link essences to some other metaphysical problem, such as
causation (which is obviously related to explanation). By the time we conceive of an object, we
already have in mind something which has been caused and has its own causal
powers. And we already know (I believe)
that modality alone, say a mosaic of categorical properties distributed across
possible worlds as in David Lewis, doesn’t provide a theory of causation. So, it shouldn’t be a surprise if there is a
problem with defining essence solely in modal terms if essence relates to
causation. I’ll try to see what’s been
written along these lines.

UPDATE: 20 November 2011:Kathrin Koslicki has posted a preprint of a chapter for a forthcoming book called "Essence, necessity, and explanation" which fleshes out a discussion similar to Gorman's. She uses an analysis of Aristotelian notions of explanation, including cause, to account for how necessary but not essential properties follow from constitutive essential ones. However, the scheme here is that essence is basic and prior to cause (I was wondering if there was a way to reverse this priority.)